關於 short article for kid ，我們在網路上蒐集到這些相關的討論、資訊與評價

【10.20集結案】

//2019 年 10 月 20 日九龍遊行案，前民陣召集人陳皓桓、民主黨前主席何俊仁、社民連前立法會議員梁國雄等 7 人，被指煽惑他人參與未經批准集結、組織未經批准集結等。7 人早前承認控罪，法官胡雅文今（1 日）在區域法院判 7 人監禁 11 至 16 個月。除了黃浩銘，其餘被告的刑期與早前 8.18、8.31、10.1 未經批准集結案刑期同期執行。//

以下是文遠的感言：

【吳文遠 - 10.20九龍遊行案件感言】

這是一宗政治案件，所以我認為這篇陳詞適合放在政治脈絡下開展。

我們生活在急劇轉變及充滿挑戰的時代。基於政府所謂「安全」的理由，記者、報館、網台主持、學者、教師、學生、藝人、歌手、工會人、社運人、民意代表以及許多市民，都一一被迫沉默，以至逐個被拘捕、檢控、囚禁。

尤有甚者，「安全」的定義還在不斷挪移及擴大。昨日出版的一篇報紙文章、一次演講、一種主張、一個標語，今天都可能被視為對「安全」的威脅。

短短數年前那些通常被判罰款或社區服務令的行動，現在會被判監禁。這裡曾經存在和而不同及真誠辯論觀點的言論空間，但現在只剩下觸目驚心的紅線。

每天都帶來法規的重新演繹，每天都突破荒謬的下限。有他們的眼中，現在甚至連兒童繪本都成為了對「安全」的威脅。

問題無可避免地浮現：究竟這些法規是要保護誰的「安全」？是公民的自由，抑或是實際上已經非常有權力的人的權力？

我們追求怎樣的秩序？這些法規的設計，是為了所有公民能夠享有法治、自由、公平競爭及繁榮的機會嗎？還是旨在引領我們進入一個政府不受挑戰及不受限制的時代？

我們發現自身正處於一個這樣的時代，人們需要作出看似簡單卻極為困難的選擇——就如哈維爾所指——我們要活在真實中，還是要服從於謊言及荒謬？

在我追求的真實生活中，我們只是像《國王的新衣》中的小孩那樣呼喊：「喂，國王根本冇著衫喎！」

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【Avery Ng: On October 20 Kowloon Rally】

This is a political case, so I think it is appropriate to frame my remarks within the political context of this matter.

We live in rapidly changing and challenging times. Journalists, newspaper publishers, broadcasters, academics, teachers, students, artists, singers, trade unionists, political activists, democratically elected representatives, and many other citizens are being silenced, arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned by the Hong Kong government for supposed reasons relating to “security”.

What’s more, the definition of this “security” is constantly shifting and expanding. A newspaper article published yesterday, a speech, an opinion, a slogan--even a gesture may be treated as a threat to security today.

Actions that would have previously and sometimes rightly merited community service or fines just a few short years ago, now lead to the possibility of jail. Where once there was the space to disagree agreeably and debate ideas honestly. Now there is intolerance.

Every day brings a new re-interpretation of the rules. Every day we reach a new level of absurdity. Even children’s cartoon books have now reached the status that they are seen by some as a threat to “security”.

The inevitable question arises: Whose security is being protected--the liberty of citizens? Or are these laws in fact protecting and securing the power of the already-powerful?

What kind of order are we seeking? Are these laws designed to uphold the rule of law, ensure freedom, a level playing field, and the chance of prosperity for all citizens? Or are they meant to usher in an era in which the government can rule unchallenged and unchecked?

In the times that we find ourselves in, one needs to make a choice that is at once simple yet immensely difficult. As Vaclav Havel writes: Do we live in the truth? Or conform to lies and absurdity?

In my pursuit to live in the truth, we are merely the kid who yelled “hey, the Emperor wears no clothes.”

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An email came from @popsugar the other day and out of curiosity, I clicked on to read an article with the title “The Major Signs That Your Kid Is Becoming A Brat“. I mean, aren’t you curious to see how your kids measure?
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As I read, I felt a whole range of emotions washed over me - horror, fear, disbelief and finally, I’m angry. The article, based on the book “Your Kid’s a Brat and It’s All Your Fault” sorts the ‘unacceptable behaviours’ by age groups.
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Apparently, for toddlers and preschoolers, your kid is a brat if he/she clings, whines and is a lousy sleeper. Between 5-10 years old, if your child interrupts or won’t take no for an answer, you’re ‘prohibiting’ them from growing up. There are more for older kids but I can’t be bothered to read on.
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I don’t know about you but my kids tick most of the boxes and for a short moment, I feared that I may be raising entitled spoilt brats. It made me question my ability as a parent and resented Will for wanting to be carried.
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Luckily I came to my senses pretty quickly. As I held my toddler and paced around the room, I thought “Fxxk it! Who came up with such an atrocious list and call kids brats for wanting affections from their parents?” This is exactly the kind of articles we don’t need. Is this responsible publishing? I don’t put the link here because I don’t want to send any traffic their way.
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Even if they are right, I’d rather raise brats than denying my children of their emotional needs.
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#thoughts #responsiveparenting #motherandson #thechillmom #willgan #Balmoral #seaview #throwbacksaturday #sgmums #sporemombloggers

Nobody’s Fool　　( January 2011 )

Yoshitomo Nara

Do people look to my childhood for sources of my imagery? Back then, the snow-covered fields of the north were about as far away as you could get from the rapid economic growth happening elsewhere. Both my parents worked and my brothers were much older, so the only one home to greet me when I got back from elementary school was a stray cat we’d taken in. Even so, this was the center of my world. In my lonely room, I would twist the radio dial to the American military base station and out blasted rock and roll music. One of history’s first man-made satellites revolved around me up in the night sky. There I was, in touch with the stars and radio waves.

It doesn’t take much imagination to envision how a lonely childhood in such surroundings might give rise to the sensibility in my work. In fact, I also used to believe in this connection. I would close my eyes and conjure childhood scenes, letting my imagination amplify them like the music coming from my speakers.

But now, past the age of fifty and more cool-headed, I’ve begun to wonder how big a role childhood plays in making us who we are as adults. Looking through reproductions of the countless works I’ve made between my late twenties and now, I get the feeling that childhood experiences were merely a catalyst. My art derives less from the self-centered instincts of childhood than from the day-to-day sensory experiences of an adult who has left this realm behind. And, ultimately, taking the big steps pales in importance to the daily need to keep on walking.

While I was in high school, before I had anything to do with art, I worked part-time in a rock café. There I became friends with a graduate student of mathematics who one day started telling me, in layman’s terms, about his major in topology. His explanation made the subject seem less like a branch of mathematics than some fascinating organic philosophy. My understanding is that topology offers you a way to discover the underlying sameness of countless, seemingly disparate, forms. Conversely, it explains why many people, when confronted with apparently identical things, will accept a fake as the genuine article. I later went on to study art, live in Germany, and travel around the world, and the broader perspective I’ve gained has shown me that topology has long been a subtext of my thinking. The more we add complexity, the more we obscure what is truly valuable. Perhaps the reason I began, in the mid-90s, trying to make paintings as simple as possible stems from that introduction to topology gained in my youth.

As a kid listening to U.S. armed-forces radio, I had no idea what the lyrics meant, but I loved the melody and rhythm of the music. In junior high school, my friends and I were already discussing rock and roll like credible music critics, and by the time I started high school, I was hanging out in rock coffee shops and going to live shows. We may have been a small group of social outcasts, but the older kids, who smoked cigarettes and drank, talked to us all night long about movies they’d seen or books they’d read. If the nighttime student quarter had been the school, I’m sure I would have been a straight-A student.

In the 80s, I left my hometown to attend art school, where I was anything but an honors student. There, a model student was one who brought a researcher’s focus to the work at hand. Your bookshelves were stacked with catalogues and reference materials. When you weren’t working away in your studio, you were meeting with like-minded classmates to discuss art past and present, including your own. You were hoping to set new trends in motion. Wholly lacking any grand ambition, I fell well short of this model, with most of my paintings done to satisfy class assignments. I was, however, filling every one of my notebooks, sketchbooks, and scraps of wrapping paper with crazy, graffiti-like drawings.

Looking back on my younger days—Where did where all that sparkling energy go? I used the money from part-time jobs to buy record albums instead of art supplies and catalogues. I went to movies and concerts, hung out with my girlfriend, did funky drawings on paper, and made midnight raids on friends whose boarding-room lights still happened to be on. I spent the passions of my student days outside the school studio. This is not to say I wasn’t envious of the kids who earned the teachers’ praise or who debuted their talents in early exhibitions. Maybe envy is the wrong word. I guess I had the feeling that we were living in separate worlds. Like puffs of cigarette smoke or the rock songs from my speaker, my adolescent energies all vanished in the sky.

Being outside the city and surrounded by rice fields, my art school had no art scene to speak of—I imagined the art world existing in some unknown dimension, like that of TV or the movies. At the time, art could only be discussed in a Western context, and, therefore, seemed unreal. But just as every country kid dreams of life in the big city, this shaky art-school student had visions of the dazzling, far-off realm of contemporary art. Along with this yearning was an equally strong belief that I didn’t deserve admittance to such a world. A typical provincial underachiever!

I did, however, love to draw every day and the scrawled sketches, never shown to anybody, started piling up. Like journal entries reflecting the events of each day, they sometimes intersected memories from the past. My little everyday world became a trigger for the imagination, and I learned to develop and capture the imagery that arose. I was, however, still a long way off from being able to translate those countless images from paper to canvas.

Visions come to us through daydreams and fantasies. Our emotional reaction towards these images makes them real. Listening to my record collection gave me a similar experience. Before the Internet, the precious little information that did exist was to be found in the two or three music magazines available. Most of my records were imported—no liner notes or lyric sheets in Japanese. No matter how much I liked the music, living in a non-English speaking world sadly meant limited access to the meaning of the lyrics. The music came from a land of societal, religious, and subcultural sensibilities apart from my own, where people moved their bodies to it in a different rhythm. But that didn’t stop me from loving it. I never got tired of poring over every inch of the record jackets on my 12-inch vinyl LPs. I took the sounds and verses into my body. Amidst today’s superabundance of information, choosing music is about how best to single out the right album. For me, it was about making the most use of scant information to sharpen my sensibilities, imagination, and conviction. It might be one verse, melody, guitar riff, rhythmic drum beat or bass line, or record jacket that would inspire me and conjure up fresh imagery. Then, with pencil in hand, I would draw these images on paper, one after the other. Beyond good or bad, the pictures had a will of their own, inhabiting the torn pages with freedom and friendliness.

By the time I graduated from university, my painting began to approach the independence of my drawing. As a means for me to represent a world that was mine and mine alone, the paintings may not have been as nimble as the drawings, but I did them without any preliminary sketching. Prizing feelings that arose as I worked, I just kept painting and over-painting until I gained a certain freedom and the sense, though vague at the time, that I had established a singular way of putting images onto canvas. Yet, I hadn’t reached the point where I could declare that I would paint for the rest of my life.

After receiving my undergraduate degree, I entered the graduate school of my university and got a part-time job teaching at an art yobiko—a prep school for students seeking entrance to an art college. As an instructor, training students how to look at and compose things artistically, meant that I also had to learn how to verbalize my thoughts and feelings. This significant growth experience not only allowed me to take stock of my life at the time, but also provided a refreshing opportunity to connect with teenage hearts and minds.

And idealism! Talking to groups of art students, I naturally found myself describing the ideals of an artist. A painful experience for me—I still had no sense of myself as an artist. The more the students showed their affection for me, the more I felt like a failed artist masquerading as a sensei (teacher). After completing my graduate studies, I kept working as a yobiko instructor. And in telling students about the path to becoming an artist, I began to realize that I was still a student myself, with many things yet to learn. I felt that I needed to become a true art student. I decided to study in Germany. The day I left the city where I had long lived, many of my students appeared on the platform to see me off.

Life as a student in Germany was a happy time. I originally intended to go to London, but for economic reasons chose a tuition-free, and, fortunately, academism-free German school. Personal approaches coexisted with conceptual ones, and students tried out a wide range of modes of expression. Technically speaking, we were all students, but each of us brought a creator’s spirit to the fore. The strong wills and opinions of the local students, though, were well in place before they became artists thanks to the German system of early education. As a reticent foreign student from a far-off land, I must have seemed like a mute child. I decided that I would try to make myself understood not through words, but through having people look at my pictures. When winter came and leaden clouds filled the skies, I found myself slipping back to the winters of my childhood. Forgoing attempts to speak in an unknown language, I redoubled my efforts to express myself through visions of my private world. Thinking rather than talking, then illustrating this thought process in drawings and, finally, realizing it in a painting. Instead of defeating you in an argument, I wanted to invite you inside me. Here I was, in a most unexpected place, rediscovering a value that I thought I had lost—I felt that I had finally gained the ability to learn and think, that I had become a student in the truest sense of the word.

But I still wasn’t your typical honors student. My paintings clearly didn’t look like contemporary art, and nobody would say my images fit in the context of European painting. They did, however, catch the gaze of dealers who, with their antennae out for young artists, saw my paintings as new objects that belonged less to the singular world of art and more to the realm of everyday life. Several were impressed by the freshness of my art, and before I knew it, I was invited to hold exhibitions in established galleries—a big step into a wider world.

The six years that I spent in Germany after completing my studies and before returning to Japan were golden days, both for me and my work. Every day and every night, I worked tirelessly to fix onto canvas all the visions that welled up in my head. My living space/studio was in a dreary, concrete former factory building on the outskirts of Cologne. It was the center of my world. Late at night, my surroundings were enveloped in darkness, but my studio was brightly lit. The songs of folk poets flowed out of my speakers. In that place, standing in front of the canvas sometimes felt like traveling on a solitary voyage in outer space—a lonely little spacecraft floating in the darkness of the void. My spaceship could go anywhere in this fantasy while I was painting, even to the edge of the universe.

Suddenly one day, I was flung outside—my spaceship was to be scrapped. My little vehicle turned back into an old concrete building, one that was slated for destruction because it was falling apart. Having lost the spaceship that had accompanied me on my lonely travels, and lacking the energy to look for a new studio, I immediately decided that I might as well go back to my homeland. It was painful and sad to leave the country where I had lived for twelve years and the handful of people I could call friends. But I had lost my ship. The only place I thought to land was my mother country, where long ago those teenagers had waved me goodbye and, in retrospect, whose letters to me while I was in Germany were a valuable source of fuel.

After my long space flight, I returned to Japan with the strange sense of having made a full orbit around the planet. The new studio was a little warehouse on the outskirts of Tokyo, in an area dotted with rice fields and small factories. When the wind blew, swirls of dust slipped in through the cracks, and water leaked down the walls in heavy rains. In my dilapidated warehouse, only one sheet of corrugated metal separated me from the summer heat and winter cold. Despite the funky environment, I was somehow able to keep in midnight contact with the cosmos—the beings I had drawn and painted in Germany began to mature. The emotional quality of the earlier work gave way to a new sense of composure. I worked at refining the former impulsiveness of the drawings and the monochromatic, almost reverent, backgrounds of the paintings. In my pursuit of fresh imagery, I switched from idle experimentation to a more workmanlike approach towards capturing what I saw beyond the canvas.

Children and animals—what simple motifs! Appearing on neat canvases or in ephemeral drawings, these figures are easy on the viewers’ eyes. Occasionally, they shake off my intentions and leap to the feet of their audience, never to return. Because my motifs are accessible, they are often only understood on a superficial level. Sometimes art that results from a long process of development receives only shallow general acceptance, and those who should be interpreting it fail to do so, either through a lack of knowledge or insufficient powers of expression. Take, for example, the music of a specific era. People who lived during this era will naturally appreciate the music that was then popular. Few of these listeners, however, will know, let alone value, the music produced by minor labels, by introspective musicians working under the radar, because it’s music that’s made in answer to an individual’s desire, not the desires of the times. In this way, people who say that “Nara loves rock,” or “Nara loves punk” should see my album collection. Of four thousand records there are probably fewer than fifty punk albums. I do have a lot of 60s and 70s rock and roll, but most of my music is from little labels that never saw commercial success—traditional roots music by black musicians and white musicians, and contemplative folk. The spirit of any era gives birth to trends and fashions as well as their opposite: countless introspective individual worlds. A simultaneous embrace of both has cultivated my sensibility and way of thinking. My artwork is merely the tip of the iceberg that is my self. But if you analyzed the DNA from this tip, you would probably discover a new way of looking at my art. My viewers become a true audience when they take what I’ve made and make it their own. That’s the moment the works gain their freedom, even from their maker.

After contemplative folk singers taught me about deep empathy, the punk rockers schooled me in explosive expression.

I was born on this star, and I’m still breathing. Since childhood, I’ve been a jumble of things learned and experienced and memories that can’t be forgotten. Their involuntary locomotion is my inspiration. I don’t express in words the contents of my work. I’ll only tell you my history. The countless stories living inside my work would become mere fabrications the moment I put them into words. Instead, I use my pencil to turn them into pictures. Standing before the dark abyss, here’s hoping my spaceship launches safely tonight….